Science Fiction

Could ongoing experiments involving the mixing of human and non-human DNA produce monstrous, over-intelligent hybrids down the road? In the U.S., human cells are already being implanted in mouse embryos, so we’ll…

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black-and-white silent science fiction film. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. It is based loosely on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.

It is the first science fiction film and uses innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the moon’s eye.

A political writer for a second rate, online news magazine, Michael Cobb is assigned by his editor to cover a sci-fi and fantasy convention in a bid to humiliate him.

Since Cobb can’t afford to turn down the job, he heads to Georgia and dives head first into the world of Griffin*Con, renowned the world over as the Mardis Gras of geek conventions. In Atlanta he finds a place that takes geeky debauchery to new heights: science fiction and fantasy, cosplay, booze, sex, comic books, drugs, slash fiction, and more.

This scene takes place on Cobb’s first day at the con:

My heart sank, killing the warmth of the drugs. The urge for locomotion finally returned to my legs and I continued my sojourn to the elevator.

That feeling of flying high without a safety net returned as the elevator doors I’d finally reached opened with a sharp DING.

After years of working pretty well in clinical trials, it’s now saved a life for the first the time — it just brought back a woman whose car wreck was so brutal it left just a liter of blood in her body, and whose religion prevented her from receiving a real blood transfusion.

The future is here, and it’s synthetic blood and organs and tiny people grown in laboratories. Oh and maybe sexy, sexy vampires.

I have one question: Was James T. Kirk involved with this mission? Via the Onion:

After more than five decades of tireless work, brave exploration, and technological innovation aimed at a single objective, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced Wednesday that it had finally completed its mission to find and kill God.

“I am ecstatic to tell you all today that we have beheld the awesome visage of the supreme architect of the cosmos, and we have murdered Him,” jubilant administrator Charles Bolden said after being drenched with champagne by other celebrating NASA employees. “There have been innumerable setbacks, missteps, and hardships over the past 50 years, but we always stayed true to our ultimate goal and we never gave up.”

“We finally got the son of a bitch!” Bolden continued. “He’s dead! God is dead!”

Great remixing and animation job by the filmmaker here, no wonder why the little guy always wanted to “phone home” … cool find from Cyriaque Lamar on io9.com:

Robert Blankenheim and Derek Johnson Productions have created a trailer for ET-X: Extinction, an unnecessarily gritty and violent sequel to Steven Spielberg’s family-friendly blockbuster.

In this preview, grown-up footage of Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore is spliced with generic disaster flick scenes (starring an authoritative Morgan Freeman, natch) and new animation of the red-eyed, cobra-necked extraterrestrials:

Imagine if in 1995 someone had described to you what life would look like in fifteen years. It certainly sounds like “the future” that was long promised by twentieth-century science fiction, Discovery…

The alien planet Gliese 581g set off a firestorm of controversy earlier this year when astronomers loudly declared it to be the first truly habitable planet found outside our solar system.

One of several planets known to orbit the red dwarf star Gliese 581, the headline-grabbing world was described by one researcher as being “just the right size and just at the right distance [from its star] to have liquid water on the surface.”

Not so fast, other astronomers cried. Are you sure this planet actually exists?

Even at a mere 20 light-years from Earth, Gliese 581g is too far away for us to see it directly. We have to infer its existence based on the planet’s gravitational tugs on its host star.

Each year, 25 “culturally” significant films are added to the registry, which was founded in 1989. Lucas’s Star Wars and American Graffiti are among the 550 titles already selected for preservation.

This year’s raft of entries includes Robert Altman’s 1971 western McCabe and Mrs. Miller starring Warren Beatty, Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and Elia Kazan’s first feature film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, made in 1945.

Good day, Cybernauts. We’ve been enjoying this endearing flick for some time, but are just now getting around to posting about it.

Cyberpunk is a 60-minute documentary from 1990 that serves as a charming bookend to the William Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories. While Gibson is featured prominently in this doc, it also expands out to illuminate an entire slice of the late ’80s/early ’90s culture that used to be featured in the late, great Mondo 2000 magazine.

Cyberpunk is a documentary that looks back at the 80s cyberpunk movement, and more specifically, how this has led to a trend in the “real” world where people were starting to refer to themselves as “cyberpunk.” The documentary sees “cyberpunks” as being synonymous with hackers. A number of writers, artists, musicians and scientists are interviewed to provide context to this movement. The guiding meme, as told by Gibson, is that information “wants” to be free. 60s counter-culture drug philosopher, Timothy Leary, provides a prediction that cyberpunks will “decentralize knowledge,” which will serve to remove power from those “in power” and bring it back to the masses. Many different potential technologies are discussed, including “smart drugs,” sentient machines, advanced prosthetics — all of which serve to give context to the idea of post-humanity and its imminent arrival on the world stage.

First a Klingon opera, now this. Klingon (the language) sure has a lot of traction for one invented for a Star Trek movie in the ’80s. And this is also a non-Christianized version of the Dickens classic, because as I learned from the story, the Klingons killed their gods. Douglas Belkin reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The arc of “A Klingon Christmas Carol” follows the familiar Dickens script: An old miser is visited on a hallowed night by three ghosts who shepherd him through a voyage of self-discovery. The narrative has been rejiggered to match the Klingon world view.

For starters, since there is neither a messiah nor a celebration of his birth on the Klingon planet of Kronos, the action is pegged to the Klingon Feast of the Long Night. Carols and trees are replaced with drinking, fighting and mating rituals. And because Klingons are more concerned with bravery than kindness, the main character’s quest is for courage.

This bombshell wearing just black lace, a pearl necklace and a white dog is Tammy Banovac, a retired surgeon in a wheelchair. She got down to her lingerie while going through airport security and still got a pat down. (Update: Turns out that Tammy Banovac posed naked for Playboy in 1997, when she was a dental surgeon in Oklahoma, under her maiden name Tammy Lynn Brewer.)

Dr. Banovac always refuses to go through the metal detector. She has to use a metal wheelchair and that means that she always gets a pat down no matter what. Lately, she says she feels violated because the pat downs have become increasingly invasive during the last few months. “If it happened anywhere else, it would have been sexual assault,” she declared to a local newspaper.